By Lee A. Daniels

In Arizona racial profiling is the law of the land.

For the time being.

Friday Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed legislation passed by the Grand Canyon State’s legislature declaring every Latino resident there a second-class citizen who can be stopped by any law officer for no reason other than that they “look” Latino and made to produce proof of their American citizenship or be arrested for “trespass.”

Of course, this is not what the sweeping legislation, the harshest anti-immigration legislation enacted in the U.S. since the 1920s, actually states. Its legalese requires (PDF) that state and local government workers, including police officers, have a “reasonable suspicion” that a person they encounter is in the US illegally before they demand proof of citizenship. In addition, among other things, it urges ordinary citizens to inform the police of anyone they suspect does not have valid citizenship documents and declares that ordinary citizens can sue local police departments if they believe police officers are not stopping and questioning individuals who look like undocumented immigrants.

Amid a torrent of criticism from the across the country, Governor Brewer adamantly declared that racial profiling won’t occur and people of Latino descent legally in the state have no reason to be concerned. One anti-immigration hawk, Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA), said confidently that racial profiling won’t occur because “trained professionals” can identify undocumented immigrants simply by looking at their clothes. Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” he said that “They will look at the kind of dress you wear, there is a different type of attire, there is a different type of – right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes.”

And the majority of the Grand Canyon State’s representatives and senators who supported the measure also denied such racist behavior is their intent.

Of course they would. They’re much too sophisticated to put things so plainly.

Instead, their rhetoric bulges with words expressing the urgent need to safeguard the security of the state and reduce crime in the streets, and so on.

I wonder: in Arizona and the nearly dozen other states whose legislatures are considering similar “get tough” anti-immigration measures, are “pass laws” next?

That’s the Afrikaner model, which the white majority in South Africa employed so effectively for most of the twentieth century to subjugate the black majority. The Afrikaners, too, declared such measures were necessary for the security of the state, and so on.

Or, will our American xenophobes follow the model of the Nuremberg Laws the leaders of Nazi Germany instituted against German Jews in the mid-1930s. They, too, declared those measures were necessary to protect the security of the state, reduce crime, and so on.

Perhaps our American xenophobes will suggest that all Latinos who are American citizens be issued an identifying patch they could be required to wear on their clothes whenever they’re out of their homes, so the police can more easily identify the “illegals” – to use the language of the xenophobes — among the real Americans.

Or, since drawing so directly on “foreign” models may be anathema to these measures’ proponents, perhaps they could take their inspiration from the infamous Black Codes the white-dominated state and local governments of the defeated Confederacy enacted immediately after the Civil War to limit the freedom of the region’s newly-freed blacks. Those laws bluntly expressed the conviction of their white proponents, who felt themselves surrounded by the far more numerous black population, that black Southerners were not to be accorded the rights of citizenship, for the security of the state and all.

Fundamentally, that same fear of being overwhelmed by “The Other,” especially in a time of severe economic strain, is what has stoked the racist attitudes of a segment of White America to the point of a dangerous paranoia. The publicly-elected proponents of these despicable proposals keep insisting there’s no racist sentiment behind them. But in fact racism permeates many of the letters-to-the-editor of newspapers and the e-mailed responses to online articles from ordinary citizens who favor such laws imposed on people who don’t look like them.

Their very language is loaded with words and phrases that have always constituted the lexicon of bigotry. The country is being overrun by immigrant criminals and the lazy with their multitudes of children who simply want to freeload off of government programs and impose their strange language and inferior, if not degenerate culture on “real” Americans.

This lexicon will be familiar to any black American who came of age during the civil rights years of the 1950s and 1960s. With a few modifications, those same arguments were part of the rhetorical arsenal segregationists employed to try to deny blacks full citizenship.

But, in fact, this pernicious lexicon is actually “race-neutral.” It’s available for use against any group, regardless of race, creed, color or place of national origin. Such was the case at the dawn of the 20th century when WASP grandees, intellectuals and politicians railed against the white “inconceivable aliens” pouring into the country from Ireland and southern and eastern Europe. So it is today. What its use then and now has in common is best summarized by the characterization the legal scholar Charles L. Black applied to the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous Plessy decision: That it was a declaration in which the curves of callousness and stupidity intersected at their respective maxima.

II.

The legal challenges to the Arizona bill’s constitutionality were already being prepared by such organizations as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Council of La Raza before Gov. Brewer signed the measure. And President Obama last week had signaled the administration’s stance when he said it was imperative that Congress act quickly to revamp the nation’s laws on immigration in order to forestall “irresponsibility by others,” adding that the Arizona legislation “undermines basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”

Undoubtedly, his subsequent sharper criticism and instruction to the Justice Department to examine the constitutionality of the measure will strengthen one of the looniest charges some significant segment of conservatives hurl against the President – that he’s not an American citizen, but instead is at the center of a Manchurian- Candidate-like conspiracy to take over the U.S. government.

That bizarre belief, propagated by the so-called birther movement, last week produced movement on another bill (PDF) in the Arizona House of Representatives. There, an amendment attached to legislation would require the President or any candidate for the presidency to file an actual birth certificate with the Arizona Secretary of State before he or she would be allowed a place on the state’s ballot in an election.

Many legal experts, including Arizona’s Secretary of State, have already said such a measure is unconstitutional because, among other reasons, it creates state-level eligibility rules for a federal campaign. According to the Arizona Republican newspaper, the bill originated with a local “birther” fringe group in the state and is supported by the state Republican Party.

That Obama can’t be president because he’s a “foreigner” springs from the same fount of race-driven paranoia that claims he holds “anti-American views” and is secretly a “Muslim,” a “socialist,” or a “communist.” Those claims – the very words place him outside the boundary of being an American citizen — are the refuge of those psychologically unable to accept a black American as President. In that regard, their twisted assertions stem the same diseased impulses that obsessed the segregationists of old: The rights and responsibilities of being an American citizen – like being President of the United States – should be reserved only for whites.

Of course, it’s no coincidence that these two pieces of legislation in Arizona and similar measures elsewhere have been put forward in a political climate boiling with fear, bewilderment, resentment and callousness. Nor that the wild claims behind them have proved impervious to logic. As one online respondent to an article in the New York Times last week succinctly put it, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”

Those groups and individuals behind these two bills who claim that President Obama and those trying to find a humane solution to the immigration crisis are “un-American” ought to look in the mirror. There, they’ll see the personification of that word.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.